I have my single platter 160 GB sata 300 NCQ drive from New Egg for about $100. Ordered at midnight, shipped the next day, dropped off by ups the next day. NewEgg is crazy good. Anyhoo its 8 meg cache, only the monster drives seem to have 16 meg caches, which seems to make sense.
I'm building a new system, but I'll try and provide some benches compaired to my really old seagate 120 gb ide.
PS how would I measure HDD performance other than Sandra? I dont know how to accurately time photoshop renders and crap like that.
PPS, this is my first SATA drive, anything I need to know about building a new system compaired with IDE, I'm using the DFI lanparty UT NF4 Ultra D.
TIA
OM